5.8. Installing Linux-2.4.22 headers

5.8.1. Contents of Linux

The Linux kernel is at the core of every Linux system. It's what makes Linux tick. When a computer is turned on and boots a Linux system, the very first piece of Linux software that gets loaded is the kernel. The kernel initializes the system's hardware components: serial ports, parallel ports, sound cards, network cards, IDE controllers, SCSI controllers and a lot more. In a nutshell the kernel makes the hardware available so that the software can run.

Installed files: the kernel and the kernel headers

5.8.2.

5.8.3. Linux Installation Dependencies

Linux depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Findutils, GCC, Glibc, Grep, Gzip, Make, Modutils, Perl, Sed.

5.8.4.

5.8.5. Installation of the kernel headers

As some packages need to refer to the kernel header files, we're going to unpack the kernel archive now, set it up, and copy the required files to a place where gcc can later find them.

Prepare for the header installation with:

make mrproper

This ensures that the kernel tree is absolutely clean. The kernel team recommends that this command be issued prior to each kernel compilation. You shouldn't rely on the source tree being clean after untarring.

Create the include/linux/version.h file:

make include/linux/version.h

Create the platform-specific include/asm symlink:

make symlinks

Install the platform-specific header files:

mkdir /tools/include/asm
cp include/asm/* /tools/include/asm
cp -R include/asm-generic /tools/include

Install the cross-platform kernel header files:

cp -R include/linux /tools/include

There are a few kernel header files which make use of the autoconf.h header file. Since we do not yet configure the kernel, we need to create this file ourselves in order to avoid compilation failures. Create an empty autoconf.h file:

touch /tools/include/linux/autoconf.h